Heat exchangers of the type described above are disclosed in an article entitled "Liquid Droplet Radiator Research" by J. Persson, EWP-1579, ESTEC 1990. Such heat exchangers are highly efficient and therefore gain ever increasing significance and acceptance in space flight compared to other conventional radiators of the same mass. Another advantage of the liquid droplet radiator is seen in its substantially smaller sensitivity against damage by meteorite impacts when operating in outer space.
The larger capacity and efficiency of such droplet heat exchangers is due to the fact that in a droplet radiator the heat to be discharged is not discharged into the outer space by way of a detour through the radiator wall. Rather, the heat is radiated directly from the cooling liquid into the outer space. The function of the heat dissipating walls of a conventional radiator is taken over in a droplet radiator by a droplet cloud freshly travelling through the outer space for the cooling purpose. These droplets are generated by the droplet generator, caused to fly through outer space, whereby their heat is discharged, and are then collected as cooled droplets in the droplet collector. A pump circulates the droplets from the droplet collector to a heat absorption location which may be a conventional heat exchanger, the outer surfaces of which come into contact with the droplets.